3 ms·

Can someone explain to me like I'm 5yo why a virus is not considered alive?

drdec 6y ago
People like to classify things. They like having neat buckets to place things in, give them a name, make them feel like they have a handle on it. The world is not easily classified. But people persist. So we end up with situations like "is Pluto a planet?" and "is a virus alive?" Then people start focusing on their classifications and definitions when in fact they don't actually matter to the reality of the situation. I need to dumb this down more if the audience is a 5 year old. People like to give things names. Like the colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. But sometimes a color can't be easily named. For example the shirt I'm wearing might look blue to me and green to you. Then we start arguing about what color the shirt is when what we really should talk about is if it matches my pants.
jcranmer 6y ago
5 is a very difficult age to target, but let me try. Viruses lack several things that are often deemed necessary for life. The most important (in descending order): * They lack the internal structure all other life has [this is the cell]. * They lack the ability to "eat" to "live" [metabolism]. * They lack the ability to make more of themselves without "borrowing" others' abilities.
downerending 6y ago
Because by themselves, they don't have most of the properties of living things. They have no metabolism, and they do not reproduce, for example. They're kind of like (physical) books. They can affect living things (people), and some books cause living things to reproduce the books, sometimes in large numbers. But few people would regard books as alive in the way that a dog or tree is.
CamperBob2 6y ago
Can someone explain to me like I'm 5yo why a virus is not considered alive? Because the scientific community carefully picked certain completely-arbitrary attributes with the intent of drawing a bright line of division between viruses and cell-based organisms. This doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to Mother Nature, of course, but it makes sense to the scientists. A much better definition of "Alive" would simply be, "Subject to the rules of evolution by natural selection." Viruses certainly quality under that rubric.
Gibbon1 6y ago
One can say that one test is all living things are thermodynamic machines. They take energy and transform it to do work. Virus fail that test. Consider that a jet airliner passes more of the is it alive tests than a virus does.

People like to classify things. They like having neat buckets to place things in, give them a name, make them feel like they have a handle on it. The world is not easily classified. But people persist. So we end up with situations like "is Pluto a planet?" and "is a virus alive?" Then people start focusing on their classifications and definitions when in fact they don't actually matter to the reality of the situation. I need to dumb this down more if the audience is a 5 year old. People like to give things names. Like the colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. But sometimes a color can't be easily named. For example the shirt I'm wearing might look blue to me and green to you. Then we start arguing about what color the shirt is when what we really should talk about is if it matches my pants.

jcranmer 6y ago

5 is a very difficult age to target, but let me try. Viruses lack several things that are often deemed necessary for life. The most important (in descending order): * They lack the internal structure all other life has [this is the cell]. * They lack the ability to "eat" to "live" [metabolism]. * They lack the ability to make more of themselves without "borrowing" others' abilities.

downerending 6y ago

Because by themselves, they don't have most of the properties of living things. They have no metabolism, and they do not reproduce, for example. They're kind of like (physical) books. They can affect living things (people), and some books cause living things to reproduce the books, sometimes in large numbers. But few people would regard books as alive in the way that a dog or tree is.

CamperBob2 6y ago

Can someone explain to me like I'm 5yo why a virus is not considered alive? Because the scientific community carefully picked certain completely-arbitrary attributes with the intent of drawing a bright line of division between viruses and cell-based organisms. This doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to Mother Nature, of course, but it makes sense to the scientists. A much better definition of "Alive" would simply be, "Subject to the rules of evolution by natural selection." Viruses certainly quality under that rubric.

Gibbon1 6y ago

One can say that one test is all living things are thermodynamic machines. They take energy and transform it to do work. Virus fail that test. Consider that a jet airliner passes more of the is it alive tests than a virus does.